With an introduction by Adam Foulds 'A masterwork, unlike any other... a delight, comic and profound, a new form of language, a new way of seeing' A.S. Byatt Hans Castorp is 'a perfectly ordinary, if engaging young man' when he goes to visit his cousin in an exclusive sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. What should have been a three week trip turns into a seven year stay. Hans falls in love and becomes intoxicated with the ideas he hears at the clinic - ideas which will strain and crack apart a world on the verge of the First World War. 'Magnificent...a beautiful, feverish account of obsessive love' -Jonathan Coe, Guardian